Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

He is correct in linking the issue of impaired mortgages to unemployment. Many people have linked it to negative equity and all sorts of other things. If one looks at it properly, the people with impaired mortgages are by and large unemployed. It is because of unemployment that we have this crisis. If we do not introduce the measures we have in the budget and if we do not get the deficit down, we will not repair this economy and, subsequently, we will have more unemployed people. The Deputy might not like the solutions but they are solutions. We are systematically working it to get the economy growing again. It is growing higher than anywhere else in Europe, bar Estonia, and we will continue doing that.

The jobs strategy is to get people back to work. Much of this is intractable. It is difficult to find a job elsewhere for someone who worked on a building site for 20 years, no matter what retraining schemes one introduces. The Deputy's solution, however, is to pile deficit on deficit and debt on debt.

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